By definition, consensus reflects an agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole. This means that consensus is essentially associated with human perception and, contrary to the more axiomatic conclusions, typically involves a semantic aspect. This has traditionally made consensus very difficult to manage and practical tools for modeling and thereby utilizing consensus information do not currently exist.
As an example, in the equity market, the decisions whether to sell or buy are typically made quickly, primarily based on the latest information available on the company in question and often through an intuitive and instantaneous interpretation on the validity of that information.
The listed companies are strictly obliged to release defined types of news directly to the markets, but most of this information deals with economical fundamentals and technical analysis, which are inherently numeral facts and therefore quite easily applicable in comprehensive analysis. With a brief look at the values of the stock it is, however, clear that valuation of a listed company must be based on a considerably larger amount of factors than the purely metric criteria currently in use.
Price Waterhouse Coopers publication Eccles, Herz, Keegan, Phillips: “The Value Reporting Revolution”, ISBN 0-471-39879-9, pages 123-142, summarizes a list of value drivers prioritized by the analysts from several countries and from different types of operators. From the results, it may be determined that several of the most valued criteria relate to factors that are not directly related to the fundamentals or neither derivable thereof. On the contrary, they typically represent the intangible and immaterial factors that do not inherently translate into numeral values but, nevertheless, form a continuously increasing portion of the total value of the company. Examples of such other relevant factors comprise the competitive position of the company, turnover of employees, versatility of product map, performance of logistic system, appreciation of the brand, performance of the management, strategic policies, customer satisfaction, quality record, etc. Furthermore, reflecting the general attitude, most of the respondents considered themselves well informed on the fundamentals but significantly less informed on the other relevant factors. This disadvantage works actually in two ways: the companies are not aware of the factors that the interested parties would consider relevant and thus do not actively publicize such material.
The common aspect of these factors is that, even though they do not directly lend themselves for numerical computations, in one way or another they involve the human perception, and therefore can be approached and/or approximated by means of consensus information.
Similar type of application areas, where opinions and perceptions are relevant, and thus consensus information is applicable, cover a lot of areas. Collection and analysis of consensual opinion information of multiple properties and for a variety of purposes may be used for evaluating, for example products (such as cars, appliances, tools, equipment, books etc.), services (hotels/lodging, restaurant/dining, attorney/legal, airline/transport, ad-agency/design etc.), organizations (business companies, educational institutes, political parties etc.), and individual persons (skillset, work history etc.)
Prior art solutions for collecting and distributing consensus information comprise essentially two categories: research and questionnaires. In the first type the consensus is essentially based on recommendations released by banking companies and other interest groups. The information in the public and/or purchased recommendations, and interviews is collected from a variety of sources and compiled into a research result. This procedure is extremely laborious and a produces one-time result that wears quickly off in the course of time. In the second type, the consensus is based on questionnaires that are provided in an electronic format (typically a table) to a defined interest group, for example subscribers of a professional magazine. The responses are compiled into numerical representations illustrating the consensus or the respondents. Also these questionnaires provide only one-time results that begin to expire right after their release. Furthermore, the people of profession are focused and tend not to be keen on spending time and energy on targets and factors they are not interested in, and thus ignore a lot of questionnaires that continuously flow in.
Consequently, an essential problem in the prior art solutions is the overall validity of the consensus information. Validity in this context has several aspects, which tend to be compromised in various ways. Firstly, the relevance of the consensus corresponds directly with the number of the members of the group that provides the assessments. A consensus of one is merely an opinion and a consensus of two may represent an understanding or a disagreement; thus only with several evaluators the consensus can be considered to truly reflect the general perception on the evaluated factor.
Secondly, the contentual validity of the information deals with semantics and scopes of interest. Lacking the axiomatic basis, the interesting factors may be, and often are, described and defined differently by different entities or interest groups. For example, banking companies typically utilize their own in-house parameters and criteria that do not directly correspond with questions posed by external researchers. It is clear that giving heuristic opinions on constantly varying and obscure definitions is neither productive nor interesting to the people of profession. The same disadvantage concerns the validity in terms of scope of interest: the most skilled evaluators with the best knowledge are often very busy and do not want to waste their time on evaluating or analyzing companies or factors that they personally do not have any interest in. Additionally, the evaluation of relevance of the topics is typically based on the perception of the party that releases the research. Due to the wide variety of the evaluated subjects and the complex nature of the cumulative conceptions of the participators, the validity of the topics may often be questionable from the point of view of the majority of the participators.
Thirdly, the representativeness of the consensus values decreases with time, gradually as well as in response to abrupt changes in the operative environment or internal operations. Immaterial factors and intangible information has typically no regulated posts where it officially should be mandatorily released. For example, the numerical information related to the fundamentals is distributed at least annually, but there is no obligation to the company to inform, for example, on a walkout of the marketing department, or dissolution of long-term co-operation with a recognized expeditor. For truly valid consensus information there should thus be means for effectively control the lifetime of the utilized assessments.